I specialise in creating unique 28 mm scale miniature armies, for Warhammer 40,000, Dust, Urban War and other science fiction games

Sunday, 24 April 2016

On the workbench: Tyranids, Tau and something darker...

They say that a today desk is a tidy mind. Well, if they ever said the opposite about painting workbenches, I wouldn't disagree.

Not very many updates recently, but that doesn't mean that I haven't been painting. I just haven't found the time to photograph things. Last week was Salute, and I had genuine intentions of posting an after-show report, but things just got in the way - instead, you can check out my (extremely truncated) summary below. Mainly, here's an update on my workbench...

First, a good client of mine for whom I've painted several Tyranid models over the last few years requested a flying hive tyrant a few weeks back. This model has been on the bench for some weeks, and he's now almost finished.

I previously did another version of this guy, which you can see below:

My client has updated his 'Nids a couple of times since I finished the project back in 2013 (has it really been that long!?!), but asked me to paint this model to make his list more competitive. I know this kit pretty well now, having also painted one for my own Hivefleet Behemoth army:

But back to the present model: he's almost finished, with some minor highlights and touching-up to be done. I added lots of speckling to the wings and skin, to differentiate this model from the last version I painted for the same army.

Meanwhile, I've been gradually working through the drones required for my Mont'ka Farsight Detachment. This has been hard work, mainly because I don't really like the drone models very much and painting so many of the same model becomes wearing... So I split the task up over several weeks, and I've varied the individual models by adding the antenna to some and painting different panels to grey etc. I've now painted 11 of them, so 5 more to go!

As for Salute, this kind of happened...

Expensive? Unnecessary? Likely to be hard work? Yes to all three, but also very, very awesome. I've had my eye on a Batmobile model for a while. Having considered the Eagle Moss and Hotwheels Elite versions, I decided on the Knight Models 30mm kit. It's a lot of resin, but just assembling the Batmobile got me in the mood. It's going to be great fun to paint up this model.

I won't do a big run-down of Salute, as many other websites have already done a better job of that. It was a pretty good show all-round, with lots to buy and see. I've attended the show several times, and this year the atmosphere and turn-out felt the best in several years. A couple of years ago, it felt as though the number of attendees really dropped off. This year, attendance was good and the number of stalls etc was good too. There were large areas for participation games but it didn't feel as though the show struggled to fill the hall (rightly or wrongly, it has felt that way in previous years).

Starship games seemed to be the order for the day this year: there were many on sale, and many games to play...

This Firestorm Armada game looked a lot of fun. There were loads of tables like this; I didn't play any games, but I marvelled at how good they looked. Yes, I was "that guy".

And Halo was also well-represented. Loads of stalls selling this, and a lot of hype for the ground assault version of the game. Good stuff!

And then there was this awesome model.

Better yet, these guys were on display. They looked even more impressive up-close - the paint-job was truly incredible.

I finally got to pick up my Kickstarter pledge of Aliens v Predator! I queued for ages at the Prodos stand, and there were many angry customers there. When I finally got to being served, they were out of stock of the Kickstarter exclusive boxed game... But the guys came good by adding an Alien Queen to my order. I have a nice stack of booster sets to get through as well, and I'm already marvelling at the level of detail on these models.

So that's it for this week! I hope to finish the Tyrant in the next few days, to varnish those drones, and then to get started on the next bug project: an Eldar army! Very excited about this one; I've already undercoated a squad of Wraithguard, and looking forward to properly strong the project...